Stop motion animation is a process where a scene is photographed frame by frame, and objects in the scene are changed between frames so that when the frame images are played back in rapid succession, the objects in the scene appear to be animated continuously. Stop motion animation is used in movies and television. For example, in the film The Empire Strikes Back, stop motion animation was used to animate models of All Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT) walkers to produce footage of the machines walking across the surface of the fictitious ice planet Hoth.
When capturing images for stop motion animation, it may be desirable in some instances to move the scene acquisition camera around the scene. One example of a situation in which camera movement is needed is when the camera viewpoint represents the viewpoint of a human character or of a camera held by a human character within the scene. If the human is moving in the scene, the camera should also move. If the camera movement is to be realistic, i.e., like a human in this example, the camera movement should emulate human movement. Another example in which moving the stop motion animation camera during scene acquisition is desirable to simulate the viewpoint of a flying object. In The Empire Strikes Back, animators programmed camera movements in software to simulate a camera affixed to flying spaceship, a camera on a crane and dolly, and other types of movements. In order to effect such movements, the programmers defined camera start, end and in some cases intermediate points, and the computer software interpolated between the points. The interpolated camera positions were then used to control robotic motion control rigs to physically move the stop motion animation cameras within the scene.
Existing methods for producing camera motion for stop motion animation may appear synthetic because the result lacks the natural complexity of a motion that is sensed when a camera motion is performed in space with physical beings and physical objects. Humans and moving objects may move in irregular patterns which are difficult to manually program into camera robot motion control systems.
Accordingly, in light of these difficulties and with the interest of creating stop-motion camera performances with specific characteristics of movement, there exists a need for methods, systems, and compute readable media for producing realistic camera motion for stop motion animation.